Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) — President-elect Barack Obama said reviving the U.S. economy will require scaling back on his campaign promises and personal sacrifice from all Americans.

“I want to be realistic here, not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace we had hoped,” Obama said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” program broadcast this morning. “Everybody’s going to have to give.”

Obama also said in the interview recorded yesterday that he wants stricter guidelines and greater transparency in spending the remaining $350 billion in the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Obama takes office Jan. 20 and is pressing Congress to act quickly on a two-year economic stimulus plan of about $775 billion that includes new government spending and tax cuts. As part of his campaign to build support from lawmakers and the public, Obama has been speaking about the economy every day over the past week, warning of a deeper and more prolonged recession without government action.

Though some Democrats have resisted elements of Obama’s plan, recent economic data have helped him make his point. The Labor Department reported Jan. 9 that the U.S. lost almost 2.6 million jobs in 2008 and that the unemployment rate jumped to 7.2 percent in December, the highest level in almost 16 years. The losses were widespread, with manufacturers, builders, retailers and temporary-help agencies axing positions.

Indicators

“Whether it’s retail sales, manufacturing, all of the indicators show that we are in the worst recession since the Great Depression,” Obama said on ABC. The result is that all Americans will feel the effects of efforts to put the economy back on track, he said.

“Everybody’s going to have to have some skin in the game,” he said.

Companies including Boeing Co., the world’s second-largest commercial-plane maker, CSX Corp., the third- largest U.S. railroad, and General Dynamics Corp., the second-largest shipbuilder for the U.S. Navy, announced job cuts last week.

Counts of perjury, theft, misconduct in office among 12-count indictment

By Annie Linskey and Julie Bykowicz

Baltimore Mayor Sheila A. Dixon was charged today with 12 counts of felony theft, perjury, fraud and misconduct in office, becoming the city’s first sitting mayor to be criminally indicted.

The case stems in part from at least $15,348 in gifts Dixon allegedly received from her former boyfriend, prominent city developer Ronald H. Lipscomb, while she was City Council president. She also is accused of using as much as $3,400 in gift cards, some donated to her office for distribution to “needy families,” to purchase Best Buy electronics and other items for herself and her staff.

Lipscomb was not indicted in the Dixon case, but he and City Councilwoman Helen L. Holton were charged this week in a separate $12,500 bribery scheme. Both cases grew out of a nearly three-year probe by the state prosecutor into City Hall corruption.

The investigation has hung over Dixon, a Democrat, even as she became the city’s first female mayor and oversaw a significant decrease in the city’s homicide rate, reducing killings to a 20-year low. Viewed as an energetic and charismatic leader, she has earned praise from residents for implementing an easy-to-use recycling program and displaying a willingness to tackle the city’s systemic racial and economic disparities.